Little Engineers: Young Children's Learning Patterns in an Educational Robotics Project

This short paper aimed to investigate how young children as little computer engineers learned in an educational robotics project. Student participants were 11 third graders at one public elementary school in Taiwan. The project in an after-school learning program lasted for five weeks. During weekly learning session, each student needed to use one visual block programming called Ozoblockly to design action patterns for their robots (Ozobot). The study adopted a case study methodology to examine the specific learning scenario. The principal researcher used a participant observation method to observe students' learning behaviors, informal after-class interviews to collect students' learning responses, and a portfolio analysis approach to examine students' programming works. The findings showed that students might obtain a basic understanding of a computer engineer after the instructional intervention. Furthermore, some specific learning patterns from young children's programming process were identified.